THE ENERGY MEDICINE KIT 1

Transcription

1 CONTENTS The Energy Medicine Kit 1 A Personal Journey into Energy Healing 1 A Series of Health Challenges 2 Licensed to Touch 4 Two Cases 6 The Essential Principles of Energy Medicine 9 Your Body s Energy Systems 11 What The Energy Medicine Kit Can and Cannot Do 20 How to Use The Energy Medicine Kit 21 Using a Crystal as Your Training Wheels 23 Notes 27

2 THE ENERGY MEDICINE KIT 1 This Energy Medicine Kit provides you with tools for becoming actively involved with the invisible universe of energy. While you may not have thought of these energies in the ways I will be speaking of them here, they are always with you. Energy is your life force. It literally animates your body, creating movement and vitality in your cells, organs, muscles, nervous system, immune system, and every other element of your physical structure. With The Energy Medicine Kit, you will be taught simple and effective techniques for working with these energies. And you will learn how to use them to enhance your health, vitality, and clarity of mind. A PERSONAL JOURNEY INTO ENERGY HEALING I was born with both a gift and a liability that together virtually assured I would end up doing healing work focused on the body s energies. The gift was an ability to see a person s energies as clearly as you can see the print on this page. The liability was a constitution that led to a series of serious and sometimes lifethreatening health challenges. Because my mother and my siblings also had a capacity to see energy, this gift did not seem special or unusual. The energies we saw in the people around us were a normal part of family talk. I actually did not realize that everyone did not have this sort of intimate, conscious relationship with their own and others energies until I was in my early twenties. When I was in fourth grade, I overheard a number of teachers gossiping about my homeroom teacher, Miss Proctor. They were belittling her intelligence, ridiculing her as being strange and eccentric, wondering out loud how she ever got through college. I was shocked and puzzled. Were they blind? The strongest thing about Miss Proctor was a beautiful, pale, creamy yellow energy emanating from her body, and I intuitively knew that meant she was wise and kind. She had a sort of innocence, but it was obvious to me that she was an advanced and trustworthy being. Her peers, as I later came to understand, would have found it easier to respect her had she assumed a more sophisticated 1

3 demeanor rather than being so spontaneous and carefree. My appraisals of people are still based on the subtle energies I feel and see emanating from them. These energies are more reliable than their words, physical appearance, status, or personality. In addition to seeing these energies, I can sense them kinesthetically. I tend to vibrate to the energies of other people. At times I feel like a tuning fork. I see and sense other people s energies as rhythms and undulations, frequencies and flows, jolts and currents, colorful swirls and geometric patterns. From the very beginning, I recognized that these colors, shapes, movements, and textures are meaningful. This recognition has proven invaluable in my work. I have learned over the years to understand that what I see and feel in a person s energies has meaning. I have also learned how to use my hands to weave these energies in order to improve a person s health, vitality, and clarity of mind. The fundamental law of energy medicine, in fact, is that matter follows energy. When your energies are vibrant, so is your body. A SERIES OF HEALTH CHALLENGES I created this Energy Medicine Kit based upon my career of working with people s energies, and on the authority of having personally overcome a series of health challenges. I was born with a heart murmur, contracted tuberculosis at age five, experienced serious food allergies and hay fever, developed the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis when I was sixteen, had a mild heart attack in my late twenties, had severe asthma in my early thirties, a malignant breast tumor at thirty-four, and I have been hypoglycemic with severe hormonal imbalances since I was twelve. But I was also born with a fairly free spirit, and I took these difficulties in stride. I learned quite early that conventional wisdom does not always work for me. Aspirins give me headaches, sleeping pills keep me awake, fruits and vegetables make me gain weight. Since traditional doctors were not particularly helpful with this physical structure that did not seem to follow the usual rules, I ve had to use my body as a laboratory. By my early thirties, my health was extremely precarious. I had two young daughters and my MS symptoms often left me in great pain and unable to walk without hours of rest after any exertion. Even walking up a few steps could put me out of commission. I spent much of my time bedridden, with pain throbbing in my thighs, observing how the energies were blocked, 2

4 and attempting to devise ways to get these energies to move, even if only very slightly. I tried to use my mind to do it. I tried making passes with my hands. I found that if I placed one hand at the top of my thigh and the other at my knee and held them there for several minutes, I could begin to feel the energy connect up. I experimented in a hundred different ways. Little by little, I was able to get the energy moving more freely through my thighs and down my legs. As I did, I found that I was able to walk for longer and longer periods of time. But my health was still delicate, and the fast-paced, polluted atmosphere of Southern California was not conducive to the healing I needed. I retreated to live a very basic life in Fiji. Early in my stay, however, I was bitten by a poisonous fly. Because my immune system was already badly impaired, I had no resistance to the bite. I became so sick, going in and out of coma, that it seemed I might die. Hearing of my situation, the shamans of the nearby village of Vatukarasa came to treat me for the bite. They buried me up to my neck in the sand and left me there for long stretches several times each day over a 48-hour period so that the toxins would be drained into the sand. I recovered, and this became an important event in setting my course toward healing work. This experience was also reminiscent of a formative period during my childhood. My mother contracted tuberculosis when I was four. She was put in a terminal ward, not expected to live. My father eventually brought her home, but our whole family was quarantined. I, too, had TB by age five. My mother was told she would not survive if she was not on penicillin for the rest of her life. Instead, she switched to all natural foods and high amounts of vitamin C. We raised chickens so we could have fresh eggs. My father planted a garden so we could eat organic vegetables. Everything we ate was pure, and we all got well. In the same way, everything I ate in Fiji was pure, and again I grew healthy. My family and I lived on a small Fijian island, out in the wilds and far from the nearest town. We swam in the ocean every day. We ate breadfruit from the ground and fish from the sea. Nothing was processed. Nothing was canned. Everything was organic. There were no fumes from cars and no chemicals in our clothing. Life was lived at a slow pace. It was a world where you could just be. There was no competition and little stress. There was no radio, no newspaper, no television. And, by simply living naturally, I grew healthy. 3

5 LICENSED TO TOUCH When I returned to the United States in 1977, I went into culture shock. My taste buds had become so sharp that I felt assaulted by the chemicals in the foods I ate. I could taste the packaging in which even the healthiest foods had been stored. I could feel the chemicals in my clothing. I wanted to move to some little, tiny town, to get away from cities, and from everything that was polluted. I wanted to raise my daughters in a healthy world. But my marriage was ending, and I did not know how I was going to make a living. While healing work comes naturally to me, I had no idea that seeing and moving energies could become a career. I had taken a pre-med curriculum in college, but my sensibilities were offended by an approach to health that was based more on what you could learn from cadavers than what you could learn from the body s living energies. Shortly after I returned from Fiji, I encountered a woman wearing a T-shirt inscribed with a picture of a hand and the words Touch for Health. When I asked her about it, her only reply was, Oh, I m so excited, I m leaving next week to be trained as a Touch for Health instructor. I felt lightning strike. I did not know what Touch for Health was, but I heard myself say, Me too. She gave me a phone number to call. I called the Touch for Health office to have them send me information. They made one of those serendipitous errors that changes a person s destiny. They sent a letter congratulating me for having successfully completed the basic Touch for Health classes, which were the prerequisites for attending the teacher s training. The next teacher s training began the following Tuesday. Off I went. Everybody else there already had a solid foundation in the Touch for Health system. What I learned during this teacher s training was that in the early 1970s, Dr. John Thie after a collaboration with the founder of Applied Kinesiology, Dr. George Goodheart developed a health education system for lay people called Touch for Health. (His book, Touch for Health, has been translated into 23 languages, and his work has helped millions.) Combining Chinese medicine with empirical techniques from the West, Applied Kinesiology and Touch for Health represent a potent synthesis of healing practices found in both cultures. Many of the techniques presented in this program are adapted from these two systems. Its use of muscle testing which I also call energy testing gave me a tool to demonstrate for a client or a student what I was seeing. 4

6 While I had never before been exposed to any training in alternative medical practices, I had the sense that I had come home to something that was deeply familiar. The training was ideal for me. Touch for Health gave me a structure that balanced my intuitive nature, and a form with which to work with the energies I could see and intuit. I next studied therapeutic massage so I could be licensed to do bodywork. The Mueller College of Holistic Studies in San Diego had stringent requirements, and I learned a great deal about anatomy, physiology, and the many forms of therapeutic touch. The licensing exam for massage therapists in San Diego in 1977 was, believe it or not, administered by the vice squad. Their interest was in preventing prostitutes from becoming licensed massage therapists. I m not good at tests, so I felt nervous as the date approached. Alone in a room with a gruff, intimidating vice officer, I waited to see if he was going to ask me questions or ask me to massage him. Instead, he said, Let me see your hands. He looked at them briefly and said, You pass. How!? I asked. You don t have nail polish, and your fingernails are short, he replied. You re not a prostitute. Armed with this dubious certificate of proficiency, I opened a private practice. With my physical illnesses and a lifetime of working with my own energies to overcome them as a backdrop, I have vigorously pursued ways to help people balance their own energies and heal their ailments. Many of my clients had suffered with problems that had not responded to conventional medical treatment. Energy medicine often attained the desired outcome where other techniques did not. I gained somewhat of a reputation, and found myself increasingly invited to teach others about how to work with their energies. I orient my classes toward teaching people who do not see or intimately feel the flow of their body s energies to nonetheless work effectively to enhance their own health and the health of others. Eventually, overtures came in for me to write a book. While I prefer to work with people in person, I finally enlisted my left-brained husband to help me, and it is with some amusement and satisfaction that I sometimes hear of Energy Medicine, which was published in 1999, being called the classic in the field. Since it was released, I have had tens of thousands of people attend hundreds of my classes, and I have learned a great deal about how to introduce them to energy medicine. The Energy Medicine Kit builds on all of those experiences. 5

7 TWO CASES To give you an idea of the range and potency of energy work, I would like to share two experiences from early in my career. One of my very first clients had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and she came to me with the hope that I could help relax her body and prepare her for a surgical procedure that was scheduled in five days. She had been told to get her affairs in order because her immune system was so weak that her chances of surviving the surgery were considered limited. Metastases were also suspected. From looking at her energy, I was certain the cancer had not metastasized. While her energy was dim and collapsed close to her body, the only place that looked like cancer to me was in her left ovary. In addition, the texture and vibration and appearance of the energy coming up through her ovary was responsive to my work with her. I could see and feel it shift, and by the end of the session, the pain that had been with her for weeks was gone. I told her that her body was so responsive to what I had done that I wondered about her plan to have surgery. I was concerned that her immune system was indeed too weak, and I was confident that by working with her energy, not only would her immune system be strengthened, but the tumor s growth could be reversed. While I made my statements with appropriate disclaimers about not being a physician, she responded in horror to the implication that she cancel her surgery. So I suggested that she at least delay the operation for two weeks. She scheduled a session with me for the next day and said she would discuss the surgery with her husband. That evening I received a call from her husband. He was outraged and threatening. He called me a quack. He said I was putting his wife s life in jeopardy by giving her false hope, and he told me I would never have another chance to confuse her again. He made it clear that she would not be coming back. When I began to respond, he hung up. I called back a short while later. She answered. Talking in hushed tones, she was clearly uncomfortable speaking with me. I said, Okay, don t postpone the surgery, but please keep your appointment tomorrow. You don t have to pay. You have nothing to lose. I believe in what I am saying. In fact, I want you to bring your husband with you. Find a way! She did not believe he would come in, but the next day, they both arrived for the appointment. I had her lie down on the massage table. My hope was to find 6

8 a way to give this traditional and skeptical man, so poignantly fierce in his protection of his wife, an experience of healing energy that his senses could not deny. I could see a dark, dense energy at the site of his wife s left ovary, and it felt like my hand was moving through a muddy swamp. I asked the husband to place his hand a few inches above the area and begin to circle it, using a motion that tends to draw energy out of the body. Not only could he immediately feel that he was moving against something, but within two minutes his hand was pulsing with pain. To his utter amazement, his wife reported that her pain diminished as his increased. By the end of the session, she was again pain-free, and she looked and felt much better. Through the use of energy testing, I was also able to show them that we had directed healing energies from her immune system to the area of her cancer. I taught him a set of procedures to use with her every day. They decided to temporarily postpone the surgery and ask for further medical tests prior to rescheduling it. After about ten days of these daily treatments from him, and three more sessions with me, she went through the additional testing. The tumor was gone. A second case that reinforced for me the potential medical effects of working with a person s energies was a woman whom I will call Leah. Leah was literally carried up the stairs to my office. The man who brought her told me she had been to the Scripps Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and many, many doctors. She was diagnosed with bronchitis, but no one could determine why she was not responding to established treatments, and she appeared to be dying. Her closest friend had died just before the onset of her illness, and she had been to a psychiatrist on a doctor s hunch that her bronchitis might be exacerbated by complicated grief, but to no avail. She was reduced to grabbing at straws, and I guess I was a straw. When Leah tried to speak, she could only wheeze. Because she had already been tested by the best, I did not start with the obvious systems, involving her lungs, but rather sank into her deepest energy system, which I call the basic grid. It appeared to me as if two of the energy pathways in her basic grid were so seriously disrupted that her life force could barely flow through them. I touched the points at either end of one of these energy patterns (one near her hip and one on her forehead), using my own body like a jumper cable to connect the circuitry and rebuild the grid. 7

9 When this energy began to move through me, it at first felt jagged. Then I could not breathe. Leah, meanwhile, was staring at me, not knowing what to make of this alternative healer who was now in some kind of agony. It went on and on. I was gasping for breath for about thirty minutes. At the moment I finally felt the energies hook up through my body, Leah gasped, and then took her first normal breaths in months. My breathing returned, as well. I moved to the second blocked energy pathway. Very soon after I began to hold its points, a grief came over me that was as deep as any personal grief I ve ever known. It was overwhelming. I began to sob, and I could not get myself to stop, regardless of how it might look to my new client. Leah told me later that, had it not been for the fact that she could now breathe better, she would have been off the table and out of there in an instant because of my lack of professionalism. After what seemed a very long time at the moment I felt the energies connect Leah began to sob in uncontrollable, loud, heaving grief. A puzzle was instantly solved for her. Leah and her best friend had traveled the world together. When her friend became ill with cancer, Leah had decided they would take this last journey together, and she had spent the final year of her friend s life caring for her. When her friend died, Leah s grief was not so much about the loss of her friend. They had consciously grieved together during that final year, and she had been irritated with the psychiatrist who insisted her physical problems were based on unresolved grief. No! She had fallen into a pit of existential despair over the thought that no one would ever be there for her as she had been for her friend. At a level below her conscious awareness, she had given up on life. Her sense of emptiness and isolation had buried itself in her lungs and manifested as bronchitis. With her basic grid reset and her immune system given a major boost, I could only hope for the best as she was still contending with a major illness. Nonetheless, she had been carried in, and now she was able to walk out of my office. Several days later, I came to work to find a long string of Guatemalan tribal bells hung on my door with a note from Leah telling me that she had been getting better and better. She also felt renewed in spirit, and she had a vision for her future. She wanted to study energy medicine and then go to Guatemala, where she and her friend had dreamed of settling. She came to see her healing crisis as a gift that opened her to a new sense of purpose. After studying with me, she moved to Guatemala and began to do healing work. For several years, I 8

10 received cards from her each Christmas with stories of people she had successfully treated. While early dramatic successes in one s career leave an indelible impression, these cases are hardly unique. I have had the privilege over the past quarter century of treating some 10,000 clients in individual sessions. The conclusion is inescapable that working with the body s energies adds a dimension to the healing process that can markedly accelerate good results, can often provide a missing key, and that almost always empowers people to reach new levels of rapport, understanding, and communication with their bodies. While I have a particular sensitivity to the body s energies, I have found that it is not that difficult to show people who do not have that sensitivity how to nonetheless work productively and effectively with their bodies energies. In addition, working with your energies increases your sensitivity to subtle energy. The Energy Medicine Kit is an introduction to some of the basic principles and procedures that my students have found the most helpful. THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF ENERGY MEDICINE Energy medicine recognizes energy as a vital, living, moving force that determines much about our health and happiness. In energy medicine, energy is the medicine, and energy is also the patient. You heal the body by activating its natural healing energies; you also heal the body by restoring energies that have become weak, disturbed, or out of balance. Energy medicine is both a complement to other approaches of medical care and a complete system for self-care and self-help. It can address physical illness and emotional or mental disorders, and it can also promote wellness and peak performance. 2 The essential principles of energy medicine include: 1 Energies both electromagnetic energies and more subtle energies form the dynamic infrastructure of the physical body. 2 The health of those energies in terms of flow, balance, and harmony is reflected in the health of the body. 3 Conversely, when the body is not healthy, corresponding disturbances in its energies can be identified and treated. 9

11 4 To overcome illness and maintain vibrant health, the body needs its energies to: Move and have space to continue to move energies may become blocked due to toxins, muscular or other constriction, prolonged stress, or interference from other energies Move in specific patterns the meridians, chakras, aura, and other energy systems each has its own structure Cross over at all levels, from the microlevel of the double helix of DNA, extending to the macrolevel where the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side controls the left Maintain a balance with other energies the energies may lose their natural balance due to prolonged stress or other conditions that keep specific energy systems in a survival mode 5 Using a technique called muscle testing or energy testing, it is possible to determine with precision where and how the body s energies are disturbed. This technique, adapted from the field of applied kinesiology, involves applying pressure to a muscle that is fed by a specific type of energy. The relative strength of that muscle provides information about the state of the energy associated with it. 6 Flow, balance, and harmony can be non-invasively restored and maintained within the energy system by: Tapping, massaging, pinching, twisting, or connecting specific energy points on the skin Tracing or swirling the hand over the skin along specific energy pathways Exercises or postures designed for specific energetic effects Focused use of the mind to move specific energies Surrounding an area with healing energies (one person s energies impact another s) These statements are generalizations based on my own experiences and the observations of many practitioners. They will give you a context as you use this kit to introduce yourself to energy medicine and its procedures. In brief, energy is the invisible 10